Hello, Baby!

I hate clichés in writing and in life, but the thing about having a baby is that all of the clichés are true.

Case in point: The days are long but the years are short.

Though some of our days certainly seem endless, the last two months have passed in the blink of an eye. Zara Jeanette Dzenitis graced us with her presence on January 15, four days shy of her due date, and our lives will never be the same.

It’s hard to know where to begin writing about the life-altering addition that is a new baby. Should I share the story of her birth? Do people want to read that?

Before I was pregnant, bloggers’ birth stories never interested me. Other people seem to love them, though, and ours was kind of a doozy, so I guess that’s where I’ll start.

It was a Wednesday. With my due date approaching, I had become hyper-vigilant about every little pain and twinge. Was that stomachache the residual effect of last night’s tacos, or the start of labor?

That day, I woke up early in the morning with cramps that I quickly began to suspect were actually contractions. They were coming in waves, but weren’t regular or particularly painful just yet.

“Today might be the day!” I told Johnny excitedly when he woke up.

Not sure how quickly things might progress, Johnny called in to work and began (finally!) packing a bag for the hospital. I threw a few last-minute things in my hospital bag and checked in with the dog sitter we’d lined up. Then Johnny started cleaning the house like a madman.

“We want to have a clean house to come home to!” he explained.

It wasn’t the first thing that was on my mind, but when my husband decides to clean the house of his own volition, I don’t ask questions.

Then, we waited. And waited. My contractions weren’t getting longer or closer together. They were painful, but not so bad that I couldn’t still take the dogs for a walk around the neighborhood.

By that evening, things hadn’t progressed any further. We were both getting antsy and a little anxious. I called my doctor’s after-hours line and they said if I was unsure, to go ahead and go to the hospital.

Roger that, I thought. This was it!

We hopped in the car and began the half hour drive to the hospital. About halfway there I decided I was thirsty, so we stopped at a gas station to get something to drink. In retrospect, this is pretty funny to me. If you’ve given birth before, you can probably see where this is going.

We arrived at the hospital. I was examined by a nurse, who promptly announced I was barely dilated. She turned us around and sent us right back home.

“Do you want my honest advice?” the nurse asked.

I nodded. Obvi.

“Don’t come back until you’re screaming in pain.”

Noted.

Disappointed but relieved that nothing was wrong, we headed home and went to bed.

The next day started out similar to the one before, with palpable but bearable contractions. Here we go again, I thought.

I had read that it was possible to experience contractions for days before you actually begin active labor, so I was mentally preparing for that possibility. At the same time, I was ready to get things moving, so I started trying every old wives’ tale I’d heard of to kickstart labor.

I curb walked. I climbed up and down the stairs. I mopped the floor. Slowly but surely, my contractions got stronger as the day went on.

Finally, around 4 p.m., I stood up from bouncing on my exercise ball and it happened: I heard a pop and felt a gush (if you’re squeamish about bodily details, head elsewhere now). My water broke!

Contrary to what the movies would have you believe, most women don’t experience their water breaking spontaneously. Instead, it’s broken by a doctor when they’re in labor. The great thing about it breaking at home, though, is that it’s a guaranteed ticket to be admitted to the hospital. Score! It also kicks your contractions into high gear, so things got intense really quickly.

Remember the nurse’s recommendation for when to come back? Within about half an hour I was at that point, so we scrambled back into the car and made the drive to the hospital for the second time in 24 hours.

This time, the thought of stopping at a gas station was laughable—I was laying down in the back seat screaming into a pillow and pleading with Johnny to run red lights so we could get there faster.

Once we got to the hospital, things moved fast. With my water visibly broken (i.e. a puddle forming at my feet) I was admitted right away. An older nurse introduced herself and began coaching me through my contractions. She had clearly done this a time or two, and she was amazing.

“Focus on your breath,” she told me in a soothing mama-bear voice. “Count slowly from one to ten.”

She showed Johnny how to take the weight off my hips and apply counterpressure to my lower back. He encouraged me and reminded me to breathe.

My goal was to go unmedicated for as long as I could, delivering the baby without pain medication if possible, but I was definitely open to the option of drugs if the pain got to be too much. Spoiler alert: it did.

After about three hours of excruciating contractions, the nurse checked my progress. Based on the pain level and how long we’d been at it, I was sure we had to be close to meeting our girl.

I was wrong. The nurse told me I was only three centimeters dilated. I was crushed. Pushing doesn’t happen until ten centimeters. There was no way I could keep this up for another three hours, let alone into the next morning.

“Okay,” I said to the nurse. “Let’s talk about drugs.”

Rather than going straight for an epidural, which would confine me to the bed, we first opted to try an IV medication that would dull the pain of contractions but would be tapered off before I delivered.

It dulled the pain alright, but it also made me feel totally high. I remember laughing as I held Johnny’s hand, finding the feeling of his fingers in mine hilarious.

It felt good to have some relief from the pain, but I also felt like I was in outer space. That was not how I wanted to experience the birth of our daughter. I asked for the IV to be turned off.

As the pain started to ratchet up again, I made the call.

“I want the epidural.”

“Oh sweetheart,” the nurse said soothingly. “You’ve made a wonderful choice.”

I think she was as relieved as I was as the anesthesiologist administered the drugs.

It was almost midnight at this point, and the next six hours passed in a blissful haze. I dozed in and out of sleep while CNN played on the hospital room TV. The nurse came in every hour or two to check my progress.

Though I had progressed to about seven centimeters overnight, by the early morning things had slowed to a crawl. The nurses changed shifts. While the night nurse had been gentle and low-key, the morning crew was all business. They started tossing around what I considered a dirty word in the context of my birth plan: Pitocin.

Pitocin is a drug that speeds up labor. Great! Except it also comes with an unpleasant side effect: it makes contractions a lot more intense. For several women I know, receiving Pitocin ended in a C-section.

There’s nothing wrong with having a C-section. I know many women voluntarily choose to have one, and I of course wanted to do whatever was best for the baby.

However, I wanted to be able to move around right after delivery without the additional recovery a C-section requires. I wanted to be able to walk my dogs and go up and down the stairs in our house. And I really wanted to experience a vaginal delivery. It was one of the few things in my pregnancy I had strong wishes about, so a recommendation for Pitocin was not what I wanted to hear.

I asked if we could wait a little longer, so that’s what we did. After another couple hours, though, my progress was still stalled. The longer you go after your water breaks without delivering, the more danger there is for infection, so Pitocin it was.

By around 10 a.m. the Pitocin had done its job and I was ten centimeters dilated. It was time to push!

As the nurses helped me get into position, they coached me to push when I felt a contraction. Except there was one problem: I couldn’t feel a thing because of the epidural.

I guess you’re supposed to be able to tell when a contraction is happening and feel the urge to push even with an epidural, but that wasn’t the case for me. I was totally numb below the waist, and my attempts at “pushing” were drawing concerned looks from the nurses. It wasn’t getting us anywhere. They opted to turn the epidural off.

Another important detail is that Zara was in what’s known as occiput posterior position, AKA “sunny side up.” This means that instead of facing my spine like most babies are when they’re born, she was facing my stomach with her head positioned against my tailbone. This explained why my contractions were so painful early on—it’s called back labor, and it feels like an axe is splitting you down your spine.

Now that I was trying to push, this position meant that Zara’s head was essentially running into part of my body instead of pointing where it needed to for her to make her way out. This was adding to the difficulty I was having.

The pain became more intense with each passing contraction as the epidural wore off. Sometimes I would push and the nurses would look excited—she’d moved! Other times they would glance at each other without saying a word—she hadn’t budged.

After three hours of pushing, multiple position changes and a significant amount of pain, I was completely gassed. Zara was stuck, and her sunny side up position was making it nearly impossible to progress those last few inches. On top of that, her blood pressure was dipping with each contraction.

A doctor I’d never met before entered the room. As the nurses filled the doctor in on what was happening, I heard her say the words I’d been dreading: C-section. She tossed it out so casually, like she was recommending I take some Tylenol.

Crying and trying to catch my breath, I looked helplessly at Johnny. He calmly explained to the doctor we wanted to avoid a C-section and asked her to lay out all of our options. I remember hearing scary words like vacuum and forceps and hemorrhage. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

At this point I had been in labor for around 24 hours. I hadn’t come this far to give up on the birth experience I’d envisioned. At the same time, I wanted what was best for the baby and the pain was becoming unbearable. Scratch that, it had been unbearable for a while.

“Just get her out!” I remember crying.

Johnny, bless that man, kept his cool.

“A C-section isn’t what you wanted,” he reminded me gently. “It’s a major surgery.”

The nurses—suddenly there were a ton of them in the room—plead my case to the doctor.

“She’s so close,” they told her. “We think she can get there.”

Between Johnny and the nurses, they managed to convince the doctor to let me keep pushing.

“You can do this,” they told me.

A new doctor rushed into the room, one who had experience turning babies. As I pushed, she used her hand to rotate Zara’s body to the proper position one tiny centimeter at a time.

The nurses surrounded the table as each contraction approached. Johnny supported my back while a nurse held each of my legs. Everyone counted to ten as I pushed. Johnny cheered me on in my ear.

“HARDER!” the head nurse yelled from the foot of the bed. “AGAIN!”

If the first part of labor was nothing like what pop culture would have you believe, this part felt straight out of a movie. I pushed like my life depended on it. My eyes felt like they were going to pop out of my head from the pressure. I remember thinking, I may die from this and being strangely okay with it.

Then, all at once, people started moving all around the room. Nurses pulled out instruments and laid out plastic sheets and barked instructions at each other.

“What’s going on?” I asked, panicked.

“She’s about to be here!” Johnny told me.

I couldn’t believe it. It was happening after all.

I don’t know how many more pushes it took from there—three or four, maybe—but I’ve never put all of myself into anything so completely in my life.

In an instant she was out and a nurse was handing me her squirmy little body. I cried and gasped and held her to my chest. As I looked in awe at her little features, it was as if I had always known them. Of course that’s what you look like, I thought.

We took turns holding her and I fed her for the first time. She looked up at us with her big eyes, blue like Johnny’s. I was smitten. Another cliché that turned out to be accurate: you forget about the pain almost instantly.

That night in the hospital passed in a blur of nurse visits, blood pressure readings, uncomfortable trips to the bathroom and bad food. Because of Covid we weren’t allowed to set foot outside the room, not even to visit the vending machine, so we both began to feel claustrophobic. We also wanted to get back to our other children, Bo and Tiki. I thought I’d be afraid to leave the hospital with our new baby, but by Saturday afternoon we were more than ready to go home.

We were discharged early Saturday evening. Johnny carefully checked the car seat while an attendant wheeled me out. I rode next to her in the backseat on the way home and at long last we pulled into our driveway. Nothing has ever felt as good as walking in the door of our own house, greeted by our two excited pups, to start our lives as a family of five. Home sweet home.

So that’s the story of how Zara joined our family. I’m eager to share more about life with a newborn, which is a challenging, fun, scary, frustrating and joy-filled rollercoaster, but that will have to wait for another day.

For now I’ll leave you with a current picture of our little sunshine, who’s two months old and has already grown so much! I’m off to change my one-thousandth diaper, fill my camera roll with more chunky cheeks and bask in all the snuggles while I can.